I don’t know the best way to word it. But here’s the situation. Back in the day computers were limited to the point that you only had so much ram and rom to work with. For example making music for the NES, you only had so much space to work with. Much of that had to do with processing power. Renoise being a sample based tracker, what if you could set a parameter such as max file size? Say for example you were trying to fit a song on a 1.4" floppy. So you could set it to not allow the file size to exceed a certain amount. 8mb to fit a small USB stick or even to be able to set it to a max of 64mb in order to fit the requirements of an upload to the renoise site.
I don’t know if I’m making much sense, but does that sound like a useful option?
IDK, but for average use I don’t think this be a relevant option. Nobody uses 1.4 floppies nowadays for other than deliberate sentimental uses. Renoise won’t make sense on a heritage computer that would depend on such floppies. File size is mostly cast by amount of samples in the tune, so to adjust, you’d most probably need to adjust the samples saved with the module.
What it might be use for, is a sort of competition with the ting that you aren’t allowed to use any external plugins (only native) and only a certain amount of sample data (aka file size limit). Like imposing an artificial limit on the music for a competition - the stuff the demoscene grew up with. I think such a compo would be loads of fun, and renoise seems to bring enough guts with itself to make it have real cool results. But then again you could just save your song and watch the output file size, and adjust sample data until you’re within limits, so you won’t need any new internal functions for such a compo. Hardwiring this into the renoise engine sounds like a lot of bad mayhem for no important use for me. Also all non-sample data in renoise modules is saved in a highly variable data format, that dynamically expands in a number of bytes by each option or note or whatever added. Oldschool modules used a data format that was much more straightforward and controllable when it comes to size. So controlling the xml data by logic would be even more mayhem. And how should it act, strip your song by some random data, resample your stuff, mess with the xml data - so you’re suprised by the negative actions it has on your music? I’d rather go into lengthy human-generated action to be within a size limit than having some random algorithm demolish my music in ways I wouldn’t like and that would make it sound way different just to be within limits. The fun about limits, I guess, is coming up with creative, custom ways to cope with them, not automatic destructive ways.
Or should it just message you that the file size limit is passed atm? You could just write a tool that would automatically save your song now and then, or on demand, and show the file size compared to the given limit for such purposes. Maybe even a tool that will automatically try to resample your sample data to lower quality to squash the file size at cost of music quality, but this will have its limits also, i.e. you probably won’t be able to make a 500mb song into 1,44mb.